Music lessons can do more than ensure children can carry a tune or stay with the beat. They can actually help children improve their memory and brain development.

Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.

The new findings indicate that not only do the brains of musically trained children respond to music in a different way than those of the untrained children, but also that the training improves their memory as well.

After one year of music lessons, the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, math and IQ.

"This is the first study to show that brain responses in young, musically trained and untrained children change differently over the course of a year. These changes are likely to be related to the cognitive benefit that is seen with musical training," said researcher Dr. Laurel Trainor, professor of psychology, neuroscience and behavior at McMaster University and director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind.

The researchers reached their conclusions after measuring changes in brain responses to sounds in children between 4 and 6 years old. For a year they took four measurements in two groups of children-those taking music lessons and those taking no musical training outside school-and found developmental changes over periods as short as four months.

While previous studies have shown that older children given music lessons had greater improvements in IQ scores than children given drama lessons, this is the first study to identify these effects in brainbased measurements in young children.

According to the researchers, it is clear that music is good for children's cognitive development and that music should be part of the preschool and primary school curriculum, in addition to any outside music training kids receive.

The new findings were recently published in the online edition of the journal Brain.

This story is provided by State Point Media.